Smartphones were just the beginning – today you can control your entire household with them. The Smart home concept has stopped being a sci-fi fantasy or a tech geek’s plaything and has become a reality accessible to everyone. You can build a smart home on your own, without pulling cables and complicated installation. And you get a helper that simplifies everyday activities, increases home security and reduces energy costs.
How to build a smart home?
When planning your smart home, you should always consider product compatibility with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or Apple HomeKit. This aspect will help you develop your smart home and make it easier to control products from one app or even with your voice using with smartphone.
Next, you need to be clear about how the different communication protocols work. Wi-Fi products connect directly to your home router. ZigBee and Z-Wave products that operate on radio waves will require a central unit (or bridge or hub). Bluetooth products connect directly to your mobile phone if you are in range, or to a central unit.
In an era of massive adoption of devices that work with Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, consider the operating system of the smart devices in your home.
Don’t worry! Even a less experienced user can set up a smart home. Setting up individual tasks and smart appliances is intuitive and simple.
How to get started with a smart home?
The foundation of a smart home is a stable and fast internet connection with a high-quality Wi-Fi router. Devices in a smart home need a smartphone on which you download and install the manufacturer’s app. The next step in setting up a smart home is to integrate the product into a third-party mobile app such as Google Home, Apple HomeKit or Amazon Alexa.
How to smartly secure your home?
Smart home or apartment security starts with access – locks, video doorbells or video doorbells are suitable solutions. Another option for securing your smart home are smart IP cameras that allow you to preview your home via a smartphone, possibly record footage and more. Smart alarms that can use sensors and sensors to guard your home in your absence. Last but not least, there are smart detectors designed to prevent major disasters – water leaks, smoke or gas detection.
How to heat your home smartly?
Smart heating needs to be categorised according to the way you heat your home. Smart thermostatic heads are suitable for central heating, while a smart thermostat is ideal for heating through your own boiler. If you want to create the comfort of different temperatures in different rooms. You need to create so-called multi-zone heating using a thermostat and thermostatic heads from the same manufacturer.
The mobile app allows you to set the temperature remotely or use your phone’s location for automatic heating. You can also create a weekly schedule that you can change at any time as needed. You will appreciate the open window detection, where after a period of rapid temperature drop, the heating stops.
How to intelligently illuminate the smart home?
if you’ve never heard of a smart home as a whole, you’ve come across the term smart lighting. And it’s no wonder, smart lighting is simple, inexpensive and can greatly enhance, or sometimes even protect, your home environment. Moreover, smart lighting offers a wide range of control and compatibility options. You can control the intensity, change the colour and turn on/off the lighting via a mobile app, smart assistant or even using geolocation.
The product portfolio in this category is also extensive. Keep in mind that the cheaper models generally do not have a lot of customisation options and cannot change colour. We further divide smart lights into two basic categories, WiFi smart lighting and lighting requiring a so-called bridge or central unit.
While WiFi-enabled smart lighting is cheaper, the main disadvantage is that every single bulb is directly connected to your router. Therefore, if you have a whole household equipped with smart lights, it can overload and therefore cause the whole home to malfunction. On the other hand, smart lighting with bridge works in such a way that only one device (central unit) is always connected to the WiFi router, which takes care of managing all the bulbs and lights. Besides the relief for the router, the bridge brings another advantage, because it allows you to control the lighting of your home even when you are not at home.
How to use smart home voice assistants?
Now it’s time to start asking the question, why bother with a mobile app when a few basic phrasesare enough to control a home? All three of the most popular smart home systems – Google Home (Google Assistant), Amazon Alexa (Alexa Assistant), Apple HomeKit (Siri Assistant) – have voice control built in.
What should we do if we don’t want to use the phone at home, ideally not at all? A smart home can also be controlled with a speaker or smartwatch with a built-in assistant. In general, the voice assistant in the speaker can be considered the centre of the entire smart home. In addition to the controls, we can also use apps for streaming music (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music), weather forecasts, traffic information or the latest news.
How to use smart home scenarios and automation?
You’re in a situation where you’re comfortable with your smart home and want to start using it to its full potential. Scenarios and automation can help you do that. A scenario allows you to trigger several actions at once – typically a “Good Morning” or “Good Night” scenario, where your voice assistant turns the lights on (off), the living room temperature up (down) and the fan on (off). There are no limits to your imagination here, you can create many scenarios and they can contain countless different commands.
Automation, as the name suggests, is here to make the home work without you. In other words, automation allows you to trigger several actions at once without your knowledge, but only if a condition is met. Opening a window triggers the heating to turn off, opening a door causes the lights to turn on, or all sorts of reactions to home security breaches. The goal is to have everything important at the click of a button, on command or completely automatically.